The over-theorization of archives confuses me more as my study of it deepens. I enjoyed reading Rick Prelinger, because to me the best way to understand things is to ground them, and he did just that for me. What are archives? Who is an archivist? Should and/or archives participatory? Archives as an institution and a political actor… I mean it goes on and on and on! This is why I now have more questions than answers and with no clear way in which I will start to unravel all my confusion because the archive is a complex organism that interacts with many actors and contains many roads.
Maybe my questions arise from a naive place, yet the separation of scholars from the archives and the separation of the archives from media archeology as reflected in “Media Archeology of Poetry and Sound”, demonstrate a constant in the field, which is the non recognition of the archive and therefore all that it comprises, hence in a way alienating it from intellectual processes and research. Moreover, I am conflicted with the dichotomy between the “bureaucratic, inflexible” traditional archive and the participatory archive being considered in contemporary culture. On one hand, I believe that the archive should be more adaptable to the changes that time imposes, yet on the other the idea of newcomers dancing within the archive realm makes me very uncomfortable.
Great. Thanks, Alyssa. I’m really glad you’ve articulated your frustration, confusion, and ambivalence 🙂 Maybe, rather than opposing the traditional, inflexible archive to the infinitely flexible participatory archive, we can create a space somewhere in-between. You might recall our discussion a few weeks ago about the future of classification: with the rise of social media, some “futurists” predicted that we’d do away with expert-defined ontologies and adopt full-own crowdsourced tagging. Ultimately, we realized that we can blend both approaches: we need a structured information architecture and a consistent vocabulary, but user-generated tags can open up new possibilities for search.